A Research On Chinese Idioms In The Comprehensive Textbooks Of Teaching Chinese As A Second Language

The Chinese has a long history and rich language elements,in which idiom is one of the important components. The vast majority of idioms come from the ancient culture books or poetry,some of them are the essence of the legendary or fable,some are summary of historical facts,some are old saying,they are widely used in everyday spoken and written language.Mastering and using idioms accurately is the important way for testing Chinese language level and language ability,at the same time it is also an important way of learning and understanding Chinese language and culture,history and civilization.In this paper,we study the idiom of four sets of comprehensive course teaching Chinese as a foreign language,including textbooks idiom quantity,grade distribution,meaning distribution,cultural information contained in the idiom.The article is divided into six parts:The first part contains the research background,research purpose,research object,research review,research significance,research methods. In the second part,we analyses the specific situation of idioms in the Chinese Proficiency Vocabulary and Grade Outline of Chinese Characters(hereinafter referred to as the "Outline") and each set of textbooks. We find that the quantity and distribution of idiom in each set of textbook are different,also, there’s great difference in quantity between textbooks in the same level. In addition,most idioms in the textbooks are not contained the "Outline".The third part focus on the meaning of idioms in each set of the textbooks, reference to the previous classification of meaning of idioms,we set up the classification framework,and divide idioms into 6 categories,20 small classes,then,we analyze the meaning distribution of idioms in each textbook. We find out that the textbooks tend to include idioms about emotion,feeling,intelligence,comparison,evaluation. Taking the level of textbook into consideration,we find the intermediate textbook tend to include idioms about emotion,feeling,intelligence while the advanced textbooks tend to include idioms about comparison and evaluation.The fourth part mainly surveys the cultural information of idioms which are contained in the textbooks but not in the "Outline",we find that idioms reflect a lot of culture,especially about plant,animal,geography,diet,clothes,figure,color, Confucianism and some traditional views. Then,we select representative idioms foranalysis.The fifth part we make recommendations about teaching methods and textbook compilation combing with the above analysis of idioms.The sixth part we summarize the main findings of the article and points out the deficiencies.